It is the kind of survival that renovation work usually destroys rather than reveals: a cagework structure, meaning a box-like timber frame of the sort once common across Britain and Ireland, preserved almost by accident within the fabric of a much later building. What makes it particularly striking is how rare it is. Early modern Kilkenny was a city built predominantly in stone, and a timber-framed artisan's dwelling of this period is an anomaly within that streetscape, a trace of a different kind of urban life than the one the grander buildings record.

The gable was uncovered during a buildings archaeology assessment carried out by Cóilín Ó Drisceoil at No. 4 Watergate Street, roughly thirty metres south of the medieval Water Gate, also known as the Irishtown Gate, which once formed part of Kilkenny's Hightown town wall. Stripping back modern accretions from the party wall between Nos. 3 and 4 revealed the structure: a 'scribed' and numbered oak frame, meaning the timbers had been pre-marked during assembly so each piece could be fitted to its corresponding joint, set on dwarf-wall foundations and measuring 7.5 metres east to west and just over three metres in height. The grooves and mortises cut into the timbers originally held wattle panelling, the woven-branch infill typical of cagework construction, though this had long since been replaced with Georgian hand-made brick. Every timber had been squared by hand using a broadaxe and pitsaw, and the toolmarks left by those processes are still visible on the wood. Radiocarbon dating of an ash dowel from the rail returned a broad range of AD 1528 to 1955, but when calibrated, the years 1633 to 1683 produced the highest probability at 48.8 per cent, consistent with what the timber technology itself suggests. A house at this location also appears on John Rocque's 1758 map of Kilkenny. Two further timbers of the same type were found reused in the roof space of the present building, suggesting the original structure was partially dismantled and cannibalised rather than simply buried. The gable itself was preserved in place behind plasterboard. Elsewhere in the same building, work uncovered a cobbled floor surface and a blocked red-brick fireplace from the later Georgian period, layered over and around the earlier fabric.